Transport Infrastructure Policy Research Articles

European highways and the geographic diffusion of economic activities from agglomerations to less urbanised areas

This paper analyses the impact of highways on the distribution of economic activities between urban agglomerations and peripheral regions in the European Union. In doing so, I use an empirical strategy based on the land use theory employing disaggregated economic and infrastructure data. To address endogeneity, I apply an IV strategy exploiting non-local highway construction as a source of exogenous variation. I find that highways contribute to the diffusion of urban economic activities into surrounding areas, reducing the income gap between European agglomerations and peripheries. Reduced-form estimations suggest that the gap would have been nearly 3% higher in 2020 if the highway networks of European countries had remained at the level of 1990. The study concludes that transportation infrastructure policies can alleviate regional income disparities, increasing economic convergence between urbanised and less urbanised areas.

European highway networks, transportation costs, and regional income

To what extent do highways increase income in the European Union? To answer the question, this paper uses detailed data on the expansion of highways in Europe between 1990 and 2020 combined with time-invariant data on more than 2.3 million roads and 1400 ferry connections. I construct a new network database of highways, roads and ferries depicting a 31-year evolution of the lowest travel times along 51 000 region-to-region routes. To tackle endogeneity, I use non-local highway improvements as a source of exogenous variation. Reduced-form estimations suggest that, through decreasing transportation costs, highways increase aggregate regional income and economic cohesion. The study determines that transportation infrastructure policies can generate substantial economic benefits and reduce income disparities between poor and rich European regions.

AN ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF THE CONSTRUCTION SECTOR ON THE GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (GDP) OF NIGERIA

The construction sector makes significant contribution to employment, domestic capital formation and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, the Nigerian Construction Sector (NCS) is beset by a number of challenges including over-dependent on foreign inputs, economic volatility, low linkages and poor project cost and time performance. The study investigates the impact of the construction sector on the GDP using a 47-year annualized Time Series Data (TSD) gotten from the United Nations Statistics Department (UNSD) database. The study employs econometric methodology which involves series of tests and procedures including tests for unit root and cointegration and Polynomial Distributed Lag (PDL) model. The summary of the estimates including the PDL indicate significant effect of the construction sector on the GDP only when the lag of the GDP is not included as one of the regressors. The study concludes that the effect of the construction sector on the GDP is not robust. Finally, the study recommends for a new national housing and transport infrastructure policy for the sustainable development of the Nigerian constructed infrastructure facilities. The study has demonstrated the relationship between the NCS and GDP. The study added to the body of knowledge by using time series data involving the use of distributed lag model (DLM), autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) model and polynomial distributed lag (PDL) model to assess the relationship.

Transport infrastructure modifications and accessibility to public parks in Greater Cairo

It is widely accepted that transport infrastructure policies have significant consequences on the environment, housing, business, and people’s everyday movement. With the use of space syntax geometric (sum of angular deviations) and topological (number of directional changes) measures and conventional network metric distance, this article analyses the change in transport infrastructure in Greater Cairo between 2011 and 2021 and quantifies its likely impact on access to 57 public parks. The study advocates for a better understanding of the streetscape changes produced by transport infrastructure policies and how they may impact access to urban green spaces (UGS), particularly parks. The results suggest that the accessibility of 40 parks was reduced at both neighborhood and city-wide scales. Moreover, more than one-quarter of the total study area, including both densely populated marginalized areas and upscale neighborhoods, was significantly negatively affected by streetscape changes. Furthermore, the average distance traveled to parks increased from 3566 (m) in 2011–3612 (m) in 2021. These distances are high compared to the few hundred meters recommended in pedestrian accessibility strategies. These findings are not only important for policy makers in Egypt but will also be helpful to other similar contexts around the world by understanding and forecasting the likely implications of design changes and suggesting targeted strategies for improving access to UGS and, in turn, maximizing UGS use rates. In particular, our findings contribute to the debate on the problems caused by inner-city elevated highways. Lastly, this study provides a general analytical framework that can be applied to other cities across the globe to assess the effects of transport infrastructure changes on access to UGS.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Pavement Damage Reduces Traffic Safety and Speed

Road maintenance constitutes a significant component of public transportation spending at all levels of government. Formulation of efficient transportation infrastructure policy requires information about factors affecting road and traffic conditions. We generate the first causal evidence that decreasing pavement quality impacts vehicle crash rates and decreases average speed. Results from Instrumental Variable models using spatially and temporally disaggregated data from Federal-Aid Highway System (FAHS) roads in California show statistically and economically significant increases in vehicle crash rates and decreases in average vehicle speed caused by road damage. These impacts imply significant increases in social costs attributable to road damage. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Priorities of marketing, competitiveness, and innovative development of transport service providers under sustainable urban development

Monitoring the growing role of implementing sustainable development goals, on the one hand, and the use of the Internet of things in various spheres of life, on the other, is changing the way people think about their mobility. The urgency of this scientific problem is the need to review municipal policies on approaches to the use of appropriate methods of public transport to improve municipal transport infrastructure policies in the light of advances in «green» energy development. This article justifies the need to focus on the study of changes in the Ukrainian taxi drivers’ behavior in the urban environment on the development of «green» energy, development of appropriate programs to coordinate the requests of users and providers of taxi services through sustainable development and digitization of taxi services. In addition, the impact of sustainable energy development on transport diversification and the use of environmental modes of transport, in particular, electric cars as taxis, are analyzed, depending on the number of charging stations and access to electricity. The methodological tools used were cluster analysis, expert surveys, face-to-face interviews, statistical and fuzzy multiple estimation methods. The subject of the study was selected taxi services and taxi users in the Ternopil region. According to the survey results, the priority factors for the environmental behavior of Ukrainian taxi drivers were the level of business automation and the size of the taxi fleet. In a survey conducted by experts to examine the environmental safety of vehicles and the level of automation of enterprises, most taxi services were found to be environmentally unsound, focusing on sustainable development and environmental issues. The most problematic are technical support, automated ordering system, and significant vehicle wear in small cities. To determine the approaches to the management of greening, the objects of study were organized into relatively homogeneous groups. To this end, a cluster analysis was conducted. The study subjects were grouped into relatively homogeneous groups. The authors justified the feasibility of differentiated strategies and reaffirmed the idea of developing different approaches to environmental development depending on the level of environmental friendliness of vehicles, business automation, and relative shares of the fleet. The study results could be useful for infrastructure scientists and practitioners, taxi managers and owners, andlocal government officials.

Politik Kebijakan Infrastruktur: Tinjauan Pustaka Kebijakan Infrastruktur Transportasi

This study examined the conceptualization of public policy consisting of public policy concepts, public policy models; Public policy process; Policy actor; Transportation infrastructure policy. Through this article it will be known the role of the policy actor in giving birth to public policy especially the transportation infrastructure policy. The actor's role will help in the success and/or failure of a policy in the field of transportation infrastructure. This was a literature study. Data in this study were collected through reviewing the literature from various sources such as googlescholar.com; sciencedirect.com and other relevant sources. The literatures that were referenced came from a variety of published years and from various policy issues that came from various countries. The conclusion of this writing was that the public policy and policy actor were very urgent and had important role of in childbirth infrastructure policy especially in the field of transportation. In the future, this article becomes a conceptual reference for interested parties to examine the issue of policy actor role in formulating public policy.

National Policy for Regional Development: Historical Evidence from Appalachian Highways

Abstract How effective are policies aimed at integrating isolated regions? We answer this question in the context of a highway system in one of the poorest regions in the United States. With construction starting in 1965, the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS) ultimately consisted of over 2,500 high-grade road miles. We use a simple model of interregional trade to motivate our empirical analysis, which quantifies the relationship between market access and income. We then calibrate the model to evaluate the aggregate impact of the ADHS and compare this with alternative counterfactual proposals. We find that removing the ADHS would have reduced total income by $53.7 billion in the United States, with $22 billion of the losses in Appalachian counties. Our findings highlight the potential aggregate benefits of transportation infrastructure policies and suggest that leakage outside the targeted area may be substantial.

Life Cycle Assessment for Transportation Infrastructure Policy Evaluation and Procurement for State and Local Governments

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time, and achieving mitigation targets requires urgent action to identify and implement strategies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, identifying, quantifying, and then selecting among the many possible strategies to achieve GHG reductions is difficult, especially without a standardized approach for comparison. Presenting alternatives in a mitigation supply curve is an approach that has been used previously to compare the costs and magnitude of mitigation potential for different strategies. Some of the critiques of this approach include the lack of a consequential perspective in determining mitigation and the lack of a life cycle perspective in quantifying mitigation and economic costs. This research uses the principles of consequential life cycle assessment and life cycle cost analysis to improve on the mitigation supply curve concept to support evaluation and procurement decisions for transportation infrastructure. Results from pilot studies for road infrastructure indicate that a consequential life cycle approach for mitigation supply curves is feasible and can support agency decision-making and communication regarding those decisions.

PROTOCOL: The effects of road infrastructure, and transport and logistics services interventions on women's participation in informal and formal labour markets in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review.

PROTOCOL: The effects of road infrastructure, and transport and logistics services interventions on women's participation in informal and formal labour markets in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review.

Decentralization and spillovers: A new role for transportation infrastructure

Inter-regional spillovers of local public goods are the main cause of decentralization failure. Assuming that the quality of transportation infrastructure policy affects the strength of inter-regional spillovers, we compare a one-step scheduling design, in which all policies are chosen simultaneously, with a two-step scheduling design, in which transportation infrastructure policy is used to influence local public goods policies. We show that decentralization failure could be partially solved with scheduling design. When regional governments correctly schedule their policies, citizens benefit from the same level of public goods but with lower taxes. Moreover, the two-step scheduling design results in a lower quality of transportation infrastructure and a higher intensity of local public goods. However, the overproduction of local public goods with positive externalities cannot be excluded.

Unbundling political and economic rationality: A non-parametric approach tested on transport infrastructure in Spain

This paper suggests a simple quantitative method to assess the extent to which public investment decisions are dominated by political or economic motivations. The true motivation can be identified by modeling each policy goal as the focus of the optimization anchoring a data envelopment analysis of the efficiency of the observed implementation. In other words, we rank performance based on how far observed behavior is from the optimal behavior under each possible goal, and the goal for which the distance is smaller reveals the specific motivation of investment or any policy decision for that matter. The approach is tested on Spain's land transport infrastructure policy since it is argued by many observers to be driven more by political than economic concerns, resulting in a mismatch between capacity investment and traffic demand. The method clearly shows that investments have generally been more consistent with a political objective (the centralization of economic power) than with an economic objective (maximizing mobility).

Policy environment analysis for Arctic seaport development: the case of Sabetta (Russia)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, a structuration model is developed to evaluate opportunities and constraints that may arise for a port authority operating a port in the Arctic. The study builds upon the new institutionalist approach to transport infrastructure policy. It argues that given the specificity of operational conditions in the Arctic, as well as the expectations of the resource-driven future transformations, the conventional port development models cannot accurately depict factors of Arctic port activity. The proposed structuration approach focuses on how four dimensions of the policy environment (physical, economic, institutional, and environmental) enable and constrain policy choices available to a port authority. Application of this model to the case of Sabetta, a deep-sea multi-functional port constructed in the Ob estuary of the Yamal peninsula (Russia), demonstrates the inextricable links between actions and institutions and pinpoints the uncertainty factors that affect Arctic port development ‘from scratch’. The practical objective of this research is to introduce a dynamic multi-factor model for systematic evaluation of the policy environment in Arctic port development. Given that industrial activities in the Arctic region will proceed at the current speed or accelerate, lessons learned from the case of Sabetta will be relevant to other port infrastructure projects in the Arctic.

Human Dimensions Approach towards Integrating Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning Policies: A Decision Support System (DSS) Based on Stated Preferences Data

While a lot of progress has been made in Germany to reduce CO2 emissions in the past years in almost all sectors of economy, however, the sector of transportation shows increasing CO2 emissions in the same period of time. Likewise, sustainability objectives of German land use policies have not been met so far, especially with regard of the continuously high rate of greenfield land used up for new housing development. In this paper, it is argued that environmental issues of both sectors have to be addressed by integrating urban housing development and transportation infrastructure planning policies. The paper reports on a stated preferences survey among house buyers in Germany, using a discrete choice approach, where parameters of sustainable urban design and sustainable transport are both integrated into one model. Building on concepts of behavioral economics, preferences are elicited for sub-samples of different “environmental awareness”. Results show differences in tastes for higher building densities to reduce land consumption as well as differences in tastes for transport infrastructure development and frequency of public transport parameters. In addition, a decision support system is developed to analyze the impact of individual parameters on choosing one alternative over the other. Form this, conclusions on potential market shares for sustainable housing and transport development are drawn and recommendations are given to implement integrated urban design and transportation infrastructure policies.

Regional analysis of domestic integration in Egypt: an interregional CGE approach

We develop an interregional computable general equilibrium model to help assess the ex ante impact of transportation infrastructure policies in Egypt. The model is integrated with a GIS network. We illustrate the analytical capabilities of the model by looking at the domestic integration of the country. Improvements of transportation costs among Egyptian governorates and of their links to the broader world economy are considered in stylized simulations. The results provide quantitative and qualitative insights (general equilibrium effects) into trade-offs commonly faced by policy makers when dealing with transportation infrastructure projects in a spatial context. In the case of Egypt, there seems to be an important trade-off between efficiency and regional equity: projects that produce potential higher impacts on national GDP also tend to contribute more to regional concentration.

In search of sustainable road infrastructure planning: How can we build on historical policy shifts?

Road infrastructure planning is undergoing major changes. Infrastructure development is increasingly considered in relation to environmental degradation, climatic impacts and societal trends. Reinforced by the notion of sustainable development, infrastructure planning is increasingly focused on the realization of integrated planning goals. In planning practice, however, the transport infrastructure policy silo is strongly sectoral in nature, which can result in efforts fragmented along sectoral lines to realize integrated goals. As a result, a gap can be found between the formulation and implementation of these goals. Meanwhile, historical shifts in infrastructure policy and planning reveal that earlier planning approaches have been adopted in response to these issues. A project-oriented planning approach seems to have developed in response to the implementation gap, while an integrated planning approach is focused on solving fragmentation. In this article we aim to explore and conceptualize these policy shifts in transport policy and planning and investigate what lessons can be drawn from these approaches to dealing with these issues in today’s road infrastructure planning. We find that the current programme-oriented planning approach is focused on combining the strengths of both historical approaches. It aims at putting the focus on an integrated planning approach, while contextualizing projects in a project-oriented planning approach. As such, the emerging programmatic planning approach provides an interesting avenue for further research.

When supply travels far beyond demand: Causes of oversupply in Spain's transport infrastructure

Spain's transport infrastructure policy has become a paradigmatic case of oversupply and of mismatch with demand. The massive expansion of the country's transport infrastructure over the last decade has not been a response to demand bottlenecks or previously identified needs. For this reason, the intensity of use today on all interurban modes of transport in Spain falls well below that of other EU countries. This paper analyzes the institutional and regulatory factors that have permitted this policy, allowing us to draw lessons from the Spanish case that should help other countries avoid the pitfalls and shortcomings of Spanish policy. Based on our analysis, we also discuss policy remedies and suggest reforms in different regulatory areas, which could help improve the performance of Spain's infrastructure policy.

From New Public Management to New Public Governance? Hybridization and Implications for Public Sector Consumerism

AbstractThis paper examines how variations in the notion of public sector consumerism become embedded in diverse governance practices. To this end, we extend the literature on public governance logics with insights from research on public sector consumerism and hybridization in public sector management reforms. Through a comparative, multi‐level analysis we trace the development of two governance logics largely corresponding to the distinction between New Public Management (NPM) and New Public Governance (NPG) in Swedish transport infrastructure policy. In contrast to research predicting or prescribing a relatively radical shift between such governance logics we show how they partly co‐evolved along two reform paths entailing notable variations in the degree of hybridization and the embedding of consumerist notions in emerging governance practices. In doing so, we draw attention to how the hybridization of governance logics is contingent on the alignment of diverse interests and differences in the process through which such logics are brought together. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research into public sector consumerism and hybridization in public sector management reforms.

Private Road to Sustainable Mobility?

This paper examined possibilities for harmonizing the objectives of two metropolitan transportation infrastructure policy trends: sustainability and privatization. The paper linked these trends through the theory of fiscal federalism, hypothesizing that metropolitan highway public–private partnerships (PPPs) can reinforce sustainability if supported by a fiscal federalist institutional environment. Case studies from seven countries revealed a primary challenge for metropolitan highway PPPs: balancing objectives for market efficiency at the project level with sustainability concerns at the metropolitan level, especially network spillovers and social equity. Ultimately, the analytical approach inhibited discerning whether fiscal federalism was the cause or result of a “good” project. A project's physical form apparently mattered in reconciling market and sustainability objectives.

Happiness and limits to sustainable tourism mobility: a new conceptual model

Current leisure mobility patterns are not sustainable. Because energy efficiency measures appear insufficient to accommodate predicted future volume growth, changes in transportation modes and volume are needed. Short-haul should be the preferred distance, public transportation the preferred mode and length of stay should increase rather than trip frequency. However, tourists are unwilling to adopt these changes. This paper proposes a new conceptual “three-gear model” demonstrating how happiness, travel motivations and perception of distance set barriers for desirable behavioral change. The model improves understanding of the gap between awareness of, and attitudes to, tourism mobility and the gap between environmentally friendly everyday behaviors and unsustainable vacation behaviors. The paper shows that happiness is integral to all stages of the tourist experience. Understanding happiness enhances the understanding of tourist behavior, and how it drives, via the speed–distance–demand loop, the three-stage model presented here. Key practical implications include the need for effective policies to break the speed–distance–demand loop, changes to transport infrastructure policies, and recognition of the role of happiness in sustainable tourism strategies. Theoretical contributions include a synthesis of theories to interrogate key behavioral gaps and a theoretical basis for future empirical studies.